Microsoft confirms "eliminate C and C++" plan, translate code to Rust using AI

Microsoft confirms "eliminate C and C++" plan, translate code to Rust using AI(windowslatest.com)

5 points by JamesAdir 145 days ago | 7 comments

It is from a distinguished engineer, not from the executives. In fact, some in MSFT are not aligned.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7407863...

BTW in a comment he mentioned that Rust offers concurrency safety. Can someone elaborate on the concurrency model of Rust? I completed the xv6 lock lab a few days ago and it was one of the most difficult labs. Hard to debug and easy to mess up.

whytevuhuni 145 days ago | |

Are you sure you mean concurrency safety, and not thread safety?

I think Rust's concurrency safety (e.g. async on a single thread) is mostly granted by the Pin trait [1], and the async code-gen making sure lifetimes make sense over .await points (which requires things to be either pinned across those points, or to not care about their location in memory potentially moving).

Thread safety is instead given by a couple of auto-derived marker traits, called Send and Sync [2], that denote which kinds of data can be sent or shared between threads safely.

This is coupled with types like Arc, Mutex, etc that can wrap data that isn't safe to share, so that the wrapped data as a whole is safe to share. It is also coupled with functions (like std::thread::spawn [3] and MPSC's send()) that have a requirement for the data to either be Sync/Send, or to take full ownership of it (which ensures there are no other active references to it).

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/pin/struct.Pin.html

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/marker/trait.Sync.html

[3] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/thread/fn.spawn.html

markus_zhang 145 days ago | | |

Thanks. I actually don't know much about concurrency/lock so I just took whatever the post said. I shall quote:

    Galen Hunt  Author
    Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft
    3d
    @Sukesh Ashok Kumar No memory safety. No concurrency safety. Of course, for a     single C or C++ code base, these qualities can be achieved with extraordinary discipline and effort--and lost with just a single mistake. With Rust, can be proven by the compiler.

__patchbit__ 145 days ago | |

Will Rust scale to 1 million developers all working at once in a metaverse?

epic games' language in development is referenced here in this presentation

   https://youtu.be/VBT0j14rn5c

ChrisArchitect 145 days ago |

[dupe] and article is out of date (other than being day late on the original story) as the LinkedIn poster updated his post walking back some of the statements.

Update in the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46360955

andsoitis 145 days ago |

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46360955

Galen Hunt Author Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft 3d @Sukesh Ashok Kumar No memory safety. No concurrency safety. Of course, for a single C or C++ code base, these qualities can be achieved with extraordinary discipline and effort--and lost with just a single mistake. With Rust, can be proven by the compiler.